The invention relates to an apparatus for the transfer of a plates, particularly glass plates, from a plate transport device to a plate support rack or a similar structure.
During the manufacture of flat glass, a flat continuously moving glass plate strip is formed by depositing the glass melt onto a liquid metal bath. After sufficient cooling and hardening, the flat glass strip reaches a cutting station, where the glass strip is cut into sections of the desired format to form panels. These panels or glass plates are then transported by a conveyor to stacking stations where they are stacked onto a rack for the transport or for further processing.
If the glass panels or plates are subsequently coated in order to provide certain properties such as light transparency, light reflection, or optical appearance, or heat-ray transparency, as is often desired for glass panels used in the construction of buildings, the side of the glass panel to be coated needs to be kept free of contaminants and impairments of any kind. For this purpose, preferably the air side of the glass panel is used (in contrast to the bath side with which the glass plate swims on the liquid metal bath during the manufacturing procedure), which is not subjected to mechanical influences during the transport to the stacking station, whereas the bath side is in contact with the transport rollers of the panel transport device. At the stacking station, however, the glass panels are engaged at the air side by a suction frame disposed at the end of a robot arm and they are lifted from the transport device and deposited on a rack.
It is the object of the present invention to provide an apparatus for the transfer of panels from a transport device to a storage rack in such a way that the top surface of the panels, that is the air side of a glass plate, is not detrimentally affected by the transfer procedure.
In an apparatus for the transport of plates from a plate transport device to a plate storage rack or similar device, including a robotic arm having at its free end a plate engagement structure, the plate transport device is provided with a recess over which the plate can be centered and into which the plate engagement structure can be moved to engage the plate from the bottom side thereof and to lift and remove the plate from the plate transport device.
Accordingly, the transfer device is so designed that, for the removal of a glass panel from the panel transport device, the suction frame will not engage the top, that is, the air side of the glass panel, but will engage the glass panel from the bottom, that is, bath side. In this way, the air side of a glass panel is not detrimentally subjected to contaminations nor is it affected by the transfer from the transport device to the storage rack.
The apparatus according to the invention is particularly suitable for the handling of glass panels, but may also be used advantageously for the handling of other plates with similar needs such as the handling of sensitive plates of metal, plastic or other materials, which are coated at their top sides or otherwise provided with a high-quality surface.
The invention will be described below in greater detail on the basis of the accompanying drawings.